Category: Service announcements

Introducing New Interactivity Features in Re/Play

Posted on by david.c.morgan

Re/Play now includes interactive elements to enhance your presentations. With these new features, you can add text, buttons, and hotspots directly onto your videos, helping to guide your students and link to additional content seamlessly.  

Getting Started 

Open your presentation and click Edit Interactions. This brings up an editor, with a grid to help you accurately place and customise your interactive elements. All elements can be repositioned. For text and hotspots, you can also resize them—hold the Shift key to move without resizing.  

Types of Interactions 

  • Text: Add text overlays by choosing a preset size and colour and set the alignment. For enhanced readability, pair your text with a background hotspot or button.  
  • Buttons: Create clickable buttons with sample text and a chosen size and colour. You can set these to pause the video when clicked, and easily link them to another presentation, a specific time within the current one, or an external URL.  
  • Hotspots: Highlight areas with hotspots that come in circle or rectangle shapes. Customise their appearance, adjust opacity, and set them to pause the presentation as needed. Hotspots can be annotated using a textbox and offer flexible linking options.  

Best Practices 

  • Plan Your Layout: Use the grid to ensure interactions align with your content.  
  • Keep It Simple: Focus on the most relevant interactions to maintain a clear, engaging presentation.  
  • Enhance Accessibility: Tag interactive elements and use chapters to make them easily identifiable for students.  

We hope you enjoy experimenting with these new tools to create more engaging and interactive learning experiences. You can find more information on our Re/Play support pages. If you have any questions or need further support, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.  

[CLOSED] Some Blackboard Assignment Email Receipts not being received

Posted on by digitaleducation

We have identified an issue with our Blackboard receipting tool, which is currently not always sending out email receipts to students after they have submitted their work. However, the receipts are always being stored in Blackboard.

As a temporary measure, we advise students to check the “Submitted” section of “My Marks” after submitting their work. If a receipt is not recorded there, they should attempt to submit their work again and then contact their school if the issue persists. However, if a receipt is present, they should take a screenshot, note the time, and be assured that their work has been successfully submitted.

We are prioritising this matter and have raised it with Blackboard as an urgent issue. We will provide updates as soon as the issue has been resolved.

 

UPDATE: Issue has been resolved. We are investigating the cause with Blackboard. Students making submissions should now receive receipts via email. Students who submitted work between Wednesday 15 Jan and Friday 17 Jan should still check receipts as described above. Please report any new instances of issues receiving receipts to digital-education@bristol.ac.uk

[Open] Issues with managing content in Re/Play

Posted on by Pete Herbert

We have been made aware that there are problems with adding Re/Play content to Blackboard courses and viewing recent recordings in the My Re/Play area of Blackboard.

We are working with the supplier to resolve these issues and will provide updates as soon as we are aware of any changes to the service.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may be causing and if you have any questions please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk

 

Blackboard Planned Maintenance Downtime Sunday 29th December

Posted on by chris.poyser

On Sunday 29th December, between 01:00 and 07:00 Anthology (Blackboard) will perform routine maintenance on our Blackboard environment. This activity will require downtime, users will be unable to access Blackboard during this period and may see a “503 Service Temporary Unavailable” error message.
If you have any questions, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.

[Closed] Turnitin delays in the generation of similarity reports

Posted on by digitaleducation

We have been informed that users may currently experience some delays in the generation of Turnitin similarity reports. However, students can continue to submit their work, as this incident does not impact the upload feature or any other functionalities within Turnitin.

The supplier is actively working to restore the service to optimal performance, and we are closely monitoring the situation. We will provide updates as we have them.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.

[CLOSED] Issues accessing other tools via Blackboard

Posted on by Hanrahan Highland

Update: Normal access to tools accessed through Blackboard has been resumed. There were issues between 07.44 and 11.13 today. 

There is a global issue creating intermittent issues with accessing other tools and services through Blackboard. This is affecting, for example, access to Re/Play, Turnitin and Marks Extract. The Blackboard engineers have identified the issue and are working on fixing it. We will provide an update on this blog as soon as we have one.

If you have any questions, please contact digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.

Lecture Recording Issue – Friday 15th November 2024

Posted on by david.c.morgan

We are aware of an issue affecting the automatic recording of some lectures on Friday 15 November 2024. While most scheduled recordings were successfully processed, some sessions were not recorded due to the recording ‘red light’ not activating. 

To avoid disruptions, we recommend checking that the red light activates at the start of your session. If it doesn’t, you can use the Record Now feature to manually start the recording. Instructions for using Record Now are available on our Lecture Capture pages. Manually started recordings will appear in your ‘My Re/Play’ area and can be added to your Blackboard course space in several ways. 

If you have been affected by a recording not being captured, and a recording from a previous year could serve as a useful substitute for your students, please contact us at digital-education@bristol.ac.uk for assistance in sharing it. 

We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. Our team is actively working with the supplier to investigate and resolve the issue.